I fear I may have lost a dear friend.

 

About a week ago, we received a disk from gamefly. It ran fine…until the early part of the first level…then *BUZZZZZ CLICK CLICK CLICK BRRRRRRRRR* and a disk read error….hmmm….I eject the disk and look it over…I can’t see anything wrong…try it again, at the same part of the game…..same thing happens. This time I extensively inspect the disk…and look at that!! a tiny almost invisible crack running ¾ of the way around the disk, just inside of the silver Xbox 360 hologram…well, the disk gets sent back as defective and I pop in Viva Piñata…I’m still getting that clicking, still getting that buzzing…every game is running slow…but no error…until last night. I pop in Viva Piñata and immediately get a “Disk is unreadable” error. So I eject it…the disk is COVERED in a white-ish dust. I clean it off and try it. Same error, more of that dust….…I try a different disk….again same thing…not as much dust. Now I do know a bit about dust and white dust does not come from bushings bearings, or friction of any sort…that would leave black dust (even if it was a white plastic bushing). So that means that the drive(I hope) has not burned up. My only thought is that that broken disk shook some small pocket of ambient dust loose and has caked over the laser…but it would at least try to run…I’m getting nothing, no drive spinning, no buzzing or clicking…nothing but that disk is unreadable….my first thought is the lock-washer on the bottom of the drive popped off….grrr that’s going to be a $$ fix. We have already decided that we will not force an RRoD (our profession is based on ethics, both in and outside of work. We will not compromise those ethics.) and anyway, if it is the $99 for a rebuild, that is not bad….or we could wait a bit and get a new Elite with the Falcon Chipset…meaning I get to play around and customize (assuming the wife lets me) …but first off, I am going to run a drive cleaner through it…then make my call to Microsoft.  Good thing we have a spare.